I read last week that the Department of Homeland Security is getting into the business of fighting “climate change.” Not EPA. Not NOAA. Homeland Security. You know, the federal agency created in response to terrorism that has all the guns and armored vehicles, and whose stated “vital mission” is “to secure the nation from the many threats we face.”

Under the guise of ensuring “disaster resiliency,” DHS has started conducting studies on the resilience of infrastructure such as roads and the electrical grid, and how to protect against what it claims are rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion. Apparently, all of this stems from a heightened awareness in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, as though Sandy was in fact caused by “climate change.” I can only assume from that chain of logic that there were no major hurricanes prior to the 1930s when evil mankind started to bake the planet.

I’ll get to the “climate change” thing in a bit. Let’s first just think for a minute about this. DHS is worrying about polar ice caps and sea levels at a time when the border is so porous that investigative reporter James O’Keefe—the guy who brought down the ACORN scam—was able to wade across from Mexico, unmolested, while dressed as Osama bin Laden. And if you think that’s not a significant issue, consider that the government is in the process of putting up a massive residence hall to house thousands of illegals on a 50 acre tract outside of San Antonio. Or if strain on infrastructure is a concern, how about the 85,000 students speaking 85 languages other than Englishnow crowding Las Vegas schools? Or the fact that in Nashville—not exactly right on the border—the school population is now 20% Hispanic. And because we’re not deporting the few people who do get caught and some 70% of them don’t show up for their immigration hearing, 40,000+ people a year are disappearing into this country even after DHS had them in custody. That, of course, is on top of the nearly a million a year we don’t catch.

The fact is that the immigrant population, legal and illegal, is at an all-time high, and DHS is doing essentially nothing to control it. And before you start on me with the predictably ridiculous cry of racism, or the we’re a nation of immigrants tripe, I’m not against immigration or immigrants. What I’m against is uncontrolled immigration. We have no idea who is coming into this country. 300,000 people in the last 3 years have come here from predominantly Muslim countries. If even 10% of them accept some or all of the violent tendencies of the militant Islamists and sharia law—and as I’ve demonstrated before, that percentage has the potential, if not likelihood, to be considerably higher—we’re talking a group roughly the same size as the entire ISIS fighting force that’s sympathetic to a worldview that wants to impose sharia law and kill—literally—everyone who disagrees, and they’re already here inside the U.S.

And DHS does nothing, choosing instead to play around with barometers and weathervanes.

Not only is DHS essentially ignoring its most basic security function, but it’s diverting its attention and resources to a man-made climate change fantasy that is so politicized and bogus that even the founder of Greenpeace had to resign and distance himself from it. Aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan does an excellent deconstruction of the data(to get all his slides and then some, look here), and it is interesting because he focuses less on cause/effect and the fraud and conflicts of interest (although he gets into those), and more on the magnitude of the observations in a historical context, even if you accept the alarmists’ data at face value (for detail on why you shouldn’t, watch here). Among his points are these nuggets:

Recent CO2 increases are insignificant, and not necessarily bad.

The “climate change” panic focuses on CO2 emissions. Why? Because if CO2 emissions are endangering the planet, then Government can regulate and tax all human activity, including breathing. Rutan points out, however, that if you take a longer view of history than the 100 – 200 years typical of alarmists’ “analysis,” we are in fact in a period of relatively low CO2 levels. During the age of dinosaurs, atmospheric CO2 levels were 6 – 8 times what they are today, and not only was the planet not catastrophically overheating, but it was immensely more fertile and covered in foliage than it is now. Higher CO2 is better for plant growth and life in general.

Furthermore, the levels that have the alarmists all in a tizzy are miniscule. The CO2 limit for confined spaces according to OSHA is 0.5%. The average CO2 level over the time life has evolved on this planet has been about 0.3%. The level of increase the alarmists want you to be afraid of is something like 0.04%.

And because it’s only man-made CO2 that we can control, it’s worth noting that greenhouse gases make up only 2% of the atmosphere, and only 3.6% of that 2% is CO2; 96.4% of greenhouse gases are something other than CO2 (mostly water vapor—you know, the stuff that turns into rain). Of that 3.6% that is CO2, only 3.4% is caused by humans. So man-made CO2 comprises a grand total of 0.12% of all greenhouse gas; 99.88% of all greenhouse gas is something other than human-emitted CO2, despite Al Gore’s mansions, private jet, and SUV.

Any recent warming is neither unusual, nor a significant threat.

Rutan takes a similar tack when he looks at the data for temperature. Alarmists focus on the last 100 – 200 years to argue that there’s a sudden and dangerous spike over the last century after what they suggest was an otherwise stable global thermometer since the dawn of time. But as Rutan points out, even if you accept the alarmists’ data, that claim needs some broader context.

First, consider that the seasonal temperature fluctuation on earth (hottest summer day vs. coldest winter night) is about 200 degrees. The average U.S. city experiences temperature changes of over 100 degrees over the course of a given year, and 25 – 30 degrees or more on any given day. In other words, the temperature changes fairly dramatically all the time. The alarmists are all worried over temperatures that they “project” will rise about 3 degrees globally over the next 100 years.

Even if we assume that’s going to happen, this is not unusual behavior for the planet, and it long predates Man, much less planes, trains, and automobiles. The fact is we are in a temperature trough relative to the last 2 million years. But even focusing just on that trough over the last half-million years, according to Rutan we find that every 85,000 years or so we get a temperature spike; the rest of that time was ice age. Over the last 11,000 years—pre-dating civilization, so you can’t blame it on Man—the earth has been in one of those ice age recoveries, but it is the longest, most stable, and coolest of those non-ice age periods. And even within that “spike,” we are nowhere near the hottest time in history, the history of Man, or even in recorded history. The earth was significantly hotter during the time of Moses, the time of the Egyptians, and the time of the Romans than it is today. Yet it, and we, are still here.

This is what your Department of Homeland Security is spending its time and your money on. It’s not securing the border, and it’s not deporting people who cross it illegally, even as ISIS is actively saying it plans to initiate attacks within the U.S. Instead, it’s chasing rainbows in an attempt to protect you against nothing.

So I have two questions for you to ask yourself:

One, what do you think they’re really doing?

Two, do you feel safe?

**************************************

EDITOR’S NOTE: This marks the 250th installment of Chasing Jefferson. In my wildest dreams I never thought we’d get this far. Thank you so much to all of you who have stuck with me and given me so much encouragement.

Do you ever look around you and ask yourself, “What the hell is happening to us?” I’ve found myself in that boat lately after a string of stories I’ve been seeing.

Wednesday, a group of students from the Penn State chapter of the Young America’s Foundation were outside the student union building handing out free copies of the United States Constitution. They were doing so in one of the campus’ handful of specially-designated “free speech zones,” which in itself begs the question why—on Constitution Day, no less—they had to confine themselves to a specially-designated area to exercise their right to freedom of expression guaranteed in the very Constitution they were trying to distribute. Worse, not only were they at a university—a place where almost by definition the whole idea is to marinate in a free exchange of ideas—but they were at a state university, meaning they were on public property.

The students were then confronted by university officials, who told them they could stand there and distribute their materials, but because they hadn’t reserved a space in advance—undoubtedly requiring a fee (read: free speech tax)—they had to take down their display table (which, of course, was allowing them to attract the attention of interested people without the uncomfortable exercise of personally confronting everyone whether they like it or not). And if they didn’t comply, the official was going to call the cops. The reason? It “violates the policy.” Nothing about the students being disruptive, destructive, or inciting violence—just mindless, jackbooted enforcement of “the policy.”

You WILL comply, and you will do so because I say so.

Now, you know the people behind these kinds of policies are the same people who were taking over university administration buildings and rioting with police when they were exercising their freedom of speech in the 1960s. Apparently anything goes when they’re the ones doing the talking, but mention a conservative idea like the Constitution—the modern Progressive Left never talks in Constitutional terms anymore—and you’d better jump through their policy hoops or shut up.

Think that’s insane? Read on.

At Arkansas State, a football player and student manager were killed over the summer in separate incidents. The team sought to honor the pair—both of whom were known to have been Christians—with a small sticker on the back of their helmets depicting a cross bearing the two students’ initials. Predictably, an atheist got bent out of shape enough to bitch, and the university punted (a decision later reversed, but only after a conservative legal foundation threatened to sue the school, and only on the stipulation that the players voluntarily wear the sticker and pay for it themselves).

How juvenile and self-absorbed do you have to be to complain about a sticker a bunch of 19-year-old kids employ to help grieve over their dead friends at an event nobody forced you to attend?

Last week, principal Val Wyatt told the football booster club at Ventura High School in California that they would be forbidden from selling 200 sandwiches donated by a local Chick-fil-A. The original reason given was that the principal was working to keep the school free of marketing by vendors attempting to reap a profit. Profits?!?! Horrors! But as Todd Starnes points out FoxNews.com, the Chick-fil-A shop donated the sandwiches; it wasn’t going to make a dime. The principal conceded that her real motivation—supported by the district superintendent—was that she didn’t like Chick-fil-A’s position on gay rights:

“With their political stance on gay rights and because the students of Ventura High School and their parents would be at the event, I didn’t want them on campus.”

Trouble is, as Starnes also notes, Chick-fil-A as a corporate entity—bear in mind even that is separate from the local franchise owner who was actually donating the sandwiches—doesn’t have a position on gay rights. And if what she’s really referring to is company president Dan Cathy’s now-infamously mis-paraphrased remarks in a 2012 interview in which he was asked about his personal views on same-sex marriage, all he said was he supported the Biblical definition of the family unit. He didn’t slander or demean homosexuals. [As an aside, I’m not even sure you can characterize his statements as affirmatively opposing gay marriage or any other “gay rights.”Saying you support traditional marriage is not the same thing as saying you oppose legislation permitting Ken to marry Steve (or marry Steve and Rick, or marry Mr. Tinkles the cat), and it’s worth noting that many of these same people on the Progressive Left support abortion at the top of their lungs yet will tell you that they do not condone abortion in their personal lives.] But it was enough to deny the kids on the Ventura High football team the benefit of a charitable donation large enough to have bought brand-new state-of-the-art helmets for every kid on the team.

I wonder what Principal Wyatt will have to say to the parents of the first kid with a life-altering brain injury.

But wait. There’s more.

Last month at the College of Coastal Georgia, physics professor Dr. Leon Gardner handed out a syllabus that informed his students if they responded to someone’s sneeze by saying “bless you”—a common courtesy dating to before the Middle Ages, and maybe even to before the time of Christ—it would result in up to a 15% grade reduction. 15%. That’s turning a B into a C-. The rule was later rescinded after a massive public outcry, but the idea that it would even occur to someone to enact it in the first place speaks volumes.

At Ramay Junior High in Fayetteville, 8th grader Chloe Rubiano came to school last month wearing a t-shirt that said “Virginity Rocks.” A laudable sentiment in a 13-year-old, don’t you think? But at a school where girls are pregnant and guidance counselors distribute condoms, apparently the concept of virginity is too disruptive and sexually-charged to be permitted in public. So she was forced to change into a gym shirt or be sent home.

This is where we are with our schools. You can’t distribute the Constitution—even in a designated “free speech zone” on public property—without being slapped with a hyper-technical violation of bureaucratic “policy.” You can’t mourn a dead teammate by putting a sticker on your football helmet. You can’t support the local high school football team by selling sandwiches donated by a franchisee of a corporation whose president says he’s happy he’s still married to his first wife and that she’s a she. You can’t say “bless you” if someone sneezes. Your 8th grader can’t support virginity, at least not out loud. Updating a post from several years ago, the 9th Circuit full panel has upheld rulings that an American high school can ban students from wearing American flags because they might incite Hispanic students to violence. And as I’ve covered previously, your 5th grader can’t read his bible in class during “free” reading time, and if you protest too loudly about your 14-year-old being assigned porn as required reading you go to freaking jail.

Meanwhile . . .

At Clemson University, students and faculty are being required to answer a survey that asks, among other things, how many times they’ve had sex in the last 3 months, and with how many people. Failure to do so is a violation of the Student Code of Conduct. Supposedly this is part of some kind of sensitivity training the federal government is requiring under Title IX—and if so, it’s a good example of why the federal government shouldn’t be funding state universities in the first place—but one struggles to see the connection. I’ll let that speak for itself.

In a world where even dozens of purported “Catholic” universities—including Notre Dame—have sponsored productions of The Vagina Monologues in recent years, and public schools make graphically illustrated sex ed books available to middle school kids, I suppose this shouldn’t be that surprising. But this is where our cow-towing to political correctness has gotten us. Sane, rational speech that happens not to fit with the Progressive narrative is banned, while perverted and hyper-sexualized expression, behavior, and intrusions are perfectly acceptable.

I understand that the First Amendment does not mean you can say anything, anytime, anywhere. And I get it that schools need to be able to maintain a certain degree of order, particularly inside classrooms, to be able to fulfill their primary mission of teaching. But this persistent and two-faced attack on conservative expression is out of control.

If the Progressive Left gets to control—by force—what we can say and where we can say it, particularly in our schools, then it’s over. We have to fight back. We have to push back against this sort of PC-fascism and reclaim our unalienable rights guaranteed to us under the First Amendment. All of us. If we don’t start doing it soon, there may be little left we have to say about it.

—Thomas Mitchell as the Lone Agent and Helen Mirren as Victoria in RED

I hate to have to keep talking about the Islamists, and you may be wondering why I’ve been devoting so much time in this space to a handful of crackpots severing the occasional head in a desert on the other side of the planet. If that were it, I wouldn’t. But when you examine the thing you begin to see that there’s lot more to it, and it is in fact a serious threat not just to Western journalists, but to Western existence.

We are told that the issue isn’t with Muslims in general, and that violent extremism is confined to a very tiny minority. We are told that this is a regional problem, something to be contained and managed. But, as Andrew McCarthy pointed out in an excellent piece in National Review Online, we have to come to grips with the fact that this is not a matter of small separate clashes with ISIS in Iraq, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Sudan, or al Qaeda wherever the hell they are. There is no meaningful distinction between these groups, and we have to understand that rather than discrete, isolated conflicts, these are in fact multiple fronts in a single war being waged by a group that, whatever their internal differences, is united in ideological purpose: eradication of Western civilization and the establishment of a unified global caliphate.

To understand why this is so serious, let’s explore some numbers.

I have previously discussed data on global Muslim attitudes collected by the Pew Research Center. In a report published last year, we saw that in most places surveyed, substantial-to-overwhelming majorities of Muslims favor making sharia the law of the land. In many places, more than half not only want sharia, but they want it applied to non-Muslims as well as Muslims. Some places surveyed showed majorities approaching a staggering 90% favor extreme penalties like beating and amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and death for apostasy. Significant numbers view suicide bombing and other violence as at least sometimes OK to defend Islam: Palestinian Territories 40%; Afghanistan 39%; Egypt 29%; Bangladesh 26%; Malaysia 18%; Jordan & Turkey 15%; Pakistan 13%. Even in the U.S., that number is 20%.

Although perhaps not the majority viewpoint, this data suggests there is a large chunk of the global Muslim population that holds attitudes consistent with, if not sympathetic to, the ideology of the “extreme” Islamists. And that’s even before we realize that Pew excluded many of the, let’s say, more enthusiastically Islamic countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Algeria, and Yemen. I wonder why? Of course it’s only conjecture on my part, but my guess is a survey including those countries would tilt the scales just a bit further towards a more ISIS-like set of beliefs.

What does this mean for an ideologically-based war against Western civilization?

Of the 1.6 billion Muslims on the planet today, there is some subset that to some degree or another supports the ideology and even the tactics of Islamist groups like ISIS. It is difficult to quantify that number, in no small part because fear of persecution or adherence to the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya (which permits a Muslim to lie in order to protect Islam or other Muslims) may skew the results away from what might be called “extremism.” I think the Pew data suggest a considerably higher number, but let’s say for discussion purposes it’s 10%. That means the Islamist “population,” if you will, numbers 160 million people and growing.

Let me put that number in perspective.

The population of Nazi Germany in 1939 was about 70 million, or less than half the size of our discussion assumption of today’s Islamist population. The combined population of Germany, Italy, and Japan at the outbreak of World War II was 186 million, or just a little bigger than the Islamist population today. In more modern terms, according to The Economist 2013 Pocket World in Figures, an Islamist population of 160 million is larger than Russia (140 million) and just a little smaller than the combined present populations of Germany, France, and the U.K. (about 207 million), and large and growing chunks of all four are Muslim in their own right.

This is not something we can just dismiss. Now, you might argue that the comparison to the Axis powers is inappropriate because the Islamists do not hold the same technological parity with the West that the Axis did, and you’d have a bit of a point. I would counter, however, that the decisive difference any technology gap might make against the Islamists is rapidly shrinking as Iran moves ever closer to going nuclear, and as we continue to supply the Islamists with sophisticated weaponry, whether by giving F-16s to an Egypt that may or may not be able to shake off the Muslim Brotherhood, giving armored personnel carriers and RPGs to an Iraqi army that abandons them as they flee before advancing ISIS forces, or by abandoning materiel ourselves because we deem it too expensive to ship back as we withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan.

But there are also a pair of practical differences that to a large extent render the technology issue irrelevant in assessing the Islamist threat. One is a matter of geography, or more to the point, lack thereof. In World War II, you knew where—in an existential sense—the enemy was. To fight the Germans, you had to go to Europe and push them back to Germany. But the Islamists—and I think this is a lot of why we find it so hard to perceive this as a single war with multiple fronts instead of several isolated and unrelated skirmishes—know no geopolitical identity. They are not bound by nationality, but by ideology, which means it is impossible to know where they are—again, in an existential sense—in order to fight them. They are both everywhere and nowhere, and the ramifications of that are frightening, because it means they are not just in Gaza and Raqqa, but they’re also in our own backyard.

The second is a matter of psychology (or psychosis). War is always brutal; there are always atrocities, and innocents are always killed. But your basic German soldier in World War II did not want to die, and he didn’t really want to kill you. Chances are he had no interest in whether Hitler conquered Europe or the world, and what he wanted most was just to go home to his farm. The Islamists, however, are an essentially all-volunteer force of true believers. If they’re fighting, it’s likely because they want to be there, and they want to advance the agenda of jihad towards a global caliphate that swallows Western civilization. More importantly, they really, honestly, in-their-heart-of-hearts-down-to-their-DNA don’t care who gets killed in the process. If it kills you, that’s fine. If it kills them, that’s equally fine; what’s even better is if they can get themselves killed while in the process of killing you. They don’t even care if their own children get killed—the internet is filled with videos of elementary age kids extolling the virtues of martydom.

Repeat after me, class: They. Do. Not. Care.

This is the nature of the threat we face; it’s real, and it’s bigger than we imagine. Whether we like it or not, this is an enemy that wants to destroy us, whether by conversion or the sword. It is an enemy you cannot identify on a map; you can’t march into its capital city and claim victory. It is an enemy that wears no uniforms; it draws no distinction on our side or its own between soldiers and civilians. And it is an enemy that places no value on human life, not even their own; this means there is no compromise to be reached, because we have nothing they want except our submission or death.

You cannot negotiate with such an enemy. Nor can you contain it. Nor is it enough to (temporarily) “degrade” it, whatever that means.

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Borodin: Captain, I would never disagree with you in front of the men, you know that. But in this case, Viktor is right: it would have been better if you had *not* informed Moscow.

Ramius: Oh, Vasili, Moscow is not the worry, nor the entire Soviet Navy. I know their tactics. I have the advantage. No, the worry is the Americans. We meet the right sort, this will work. We meet some “buckaroo”. . .

—Sam Neill as First Officer Vasili Borodin, and Sean Connery as Captain Marko Ramius in The Hunt For Red October

I have complained many times in this space about this President’s lack of visibility and more-than-curious refusal to address the nation on serious crises. I’m beginning to re-think that, and maybe it’s better sometimes if he’d just keep his mouth shut.

On Thursday Obama broke from his usual pattern and actually gave a press conference to address the situation with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. During those remarks, the President said, “I don’t want to put the cart before the horse. We don’t have a strategy yet.”

What?

This is troubling on a number of different levels. First, if you don’t yet have a strategy, why on earth are you holding a presser to announce that fact to the world, including ISIS? As we’ll discuss in a moment, this is not an isolated incident for this, er, Commander-in-Chief.

Second, how is it that the President has no strategy for dealing with ISIS? The group has been part of the anti-Assad uprising in Syria for years. Although he cavalierly dismissed them as the “JV” back in January of this year, the intelligence community has been warning about them since about that same time. And it’s been all over mainstream Western news for months that ISIS was taking vast territories from a badly overmatched Iraqi army. On June 9, ISIS captured the key Iraqi city of Mosul. Yet nearly three months later, the Obama administration still doesn’t have a plan for dealing with them?

This comes on the heels of Obama in effect announcing that he doesn’t yet have a plan for dealing with increased Russian aggression in Ukraine. There he went a step further by announcing what his plans would not be, explicitly taking any military response off the table. I am not suggesting that military intervention necessarily is the appropriate response to the situation in Ukraine, but why on earth would you say out loud that it’s not an option? By doing that, Vladimir Putin now knows the worst risk he faces is economic sanctions, and with winter approaching a Europe that depends on Russian gas he knows the U.S. is not likely to get significant European support for much beyond what is already in place.

And this is not new for the Obama administration.

Recall March 2012, when Obama—thinking he was off-mic—told then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that after the election he would have “more flexibility” regarding U.S. missile defense systems in Europe. Translation: he told the Russians that if they would just be patient, he would be able and willing to give them what they want.

If publicly telling your adversaries that you’re taking options off the table is bad, the reverse—publicly making threats you are not willing to carry out—may be worse. Rewind to August 2012, when the President told the world that the use of chemical or biological weapons in the Syrian conflict would be a “red line” for the U.S. as far as military intervention. Fast-forward to August 2013, when alleged evidence that the Assad regime was using such weapons against civilians prompted calls for action, and Obama denied he said what he said, and then he did nothing.

As not quite an aside, this is essentially the same thing he did with respect to Benghazi, when he promised to bring those responsible for the attacks to justice, and has done basically nothing since. He is now in the process of doing precisely the same thing with respect to the murder of journalist James Foley. Yet while on his recent vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, he found time to work in eight rounds of golf, raising his total to 35 rounds this year, and 192 rounds since he took office. It is also worth noting that while ISIS and the Russians have been on the march and the administration did not have a plan, the Commander-in-Chief had time to attend over 40 fundraisers this year; that’s over eighty in his second term, nearly three times Bush 43’s second term tally. Obama’s total of nearly 400 is second only to Bill Clinton.

Time and again, the President has publicly shot off his mouth about strategies and plans—or the lack thereof—with respect to foreign policy matters. He has absolutely no grasp of the concept of playing it close to the vest when dealing with adversaries. Sun Tzu, writing some 2,500 years ago, emphasized the importance of information, particularly about the capabilities and intentions of your opponent, in deciding conflicts; Obama seems to have missed that one.

This administration lives in a state of total denial regarding the threat from our enemies. In point of fact, the administration has expressly denied that ISIS is at war with the U.S., despite the fact that ISIS has expressly and repeatedly said that it is. Instead of acknowledging the reality and dealing with it for what it is, the Obama administration steadfastly refuses to take them at their word, and has consistently attempted to deal with ISIS and other Islamists as civilian criminals, rather than soldiers at war. Further, FreeBeacon.com reports that the latest FBI domestic threat assessment refuses to include Islamist jihadis among those threats, focusing instead on things like anti-government militia groups, black separatists, and both sides of the abortion debate. The FreeBeacon piece notes that the FBI is advised on domestic terror threats by operatives of al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

This childish game of insisting it won’t be so as long as we refuse to name it is dangerous. You may choose not to defend yourself, but you have no choice about being in a fight if the other guy wants to fight. When you broadcast your every move to the world, ignore what your adversaries tell you are their intentions, and on top of that allow those same adversaries to advise you on how to respond to threats, your ability to defend yourself even if you wanted to is reduced to nil.

Perhaps we could do with a little less talking, and a little more doing.

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